From STEM to STEAM: Adding art to science

John Maeda, president of Rhode Island School of Design, of one of the US’s most prestigious art schools, wants to turn STEM - science, technology, engineering and mathematics - into STEAM by incorporating art and design.

Why do we need art?Scientists and artists are extremely innovative - it’s just the way they work looks different. The great scientists have models all over their desks; they’re tinkering, playing, ripping things up. And the best artists aren’t sitting there just making; they’re reflecting, thinking, spending years on an idea. STEM to STEAM is a statement about how we believe that STEM will save the economy. But what happens when you focus somewhere is that you lose it elsewhere. Art and design is somehow seen as something lesser. We’ve been positioning art and design closer to STEM and finding synergies. People get excited because someone is showing how the arts can be part of the same pool of knowledge. And unless you can grow all at the same time, where will innovation come from?

What made you want to spearhead this?In third grade, my teacher told my parents I was good at mathematics and art. My father would only remember that I was good at mathematics, which is very common in a blue-collar immigrant family. The goal was to get us to college, that’s all. I went to MIT because I was good at mathematics, but later I defected for art school. Ever since, I’ve been trying to figure out how they overlap, and how they’re separate and distinct.

How are you spreading the word?We’ve been very active in Congress to position art as vital to national security, and the National Science Foundation is listening, the National Defense University is listening, and we’re working with the National Endowment for the Arts. Building a group of champions has been key.

What else?If you don’t have a PhD, you can’t get research funding. Artists usually don’t have PhDs so we’ve been looking for states that want to broaden their innovation policies. Rhode Island now includes artists and designers among the people who can apply for science funding. The third route is companies. Companies are dying for creative people. For example, the Facebook timeline feature was designed by Rhode Island School of Design graduates.

Isn’t fine art seen as wildly impractical?Totally. When you think of a designer, you think of someone who wears a black turtleneck and cool glasses, and you think of an artist as someone who pees in your fireplace and swears. Why would you trust these people with national security or your company’s future? We’ve worked to show there are articulate artists and designers who champion change in the world.

Have you produced academic papers?The National Science Foundation funded workshops at universities and colleges, and white papers came out of that. We’re also collaborating with the NSF on new ways to visualise oceanic data, to see the impact of climate change on marine life. It’s part of EPSCoR, a programme funding research in different states. We were the only art school named as a principle investigator on one of these grants. We have publications from that too.

Is STEAM talk tricky when research funds are tight?Crowdfunding sites are changing the game. We partnered with Square, the mobile payments device company - so when people ask how to sell their work, you can say, sell it right now. And there are systems like Kickstarter, where you post an idea and people fund it, from $100 to $1 million. They fund creative impractical ideas and practical ones. It depends on the economic situation. When we’re OK, we can do more blue sky. Now, the last thing we want to do is to dream.

(Image: Glenn Copus/Evening Standard/Rex Features)

Is dreaming important?You know the Exploratorium - the art and science museum in San Francisco founded by Frank Oppenheimer, brother of Robert Oppenheimer? They were both physicists, but one was an artist physicist, the other a physicist and politician. During the cold war, Frank was labeled a communist and ended up in Colorado on a farm with his wife and family. He wasn’t allowed into academia but a small high school let him teach science. After a while, the local university began to get amazing students from this no-name city, because Oppenheimer was teaching science in a very blue-sky way. It’s that blue sky living in someone’s backyard we have to preserve.

Am I ahead of this curve? I'm a '75 RISD grad in architecture, licensed to practice in '79, and have been doing my own structural design along with the architectural since then. Wisconsin permits this. I had a 2 year degree in civil engineering before attending RISD.

Christopher Chew
on August 8, 2012 9:22 PM

I would imagine that you are not alone either. I graduated With a degree in Theater Arts from Carnegie Mellon University in the early 90s and there was already a great deal of interdisciplinary work being done there at that time. Without recognizing it as STEAM, projects incorporating all of its elements were being developed all over the campus. I am getting my doctorate in Educational Leadership right now and working to bring this concept of STEAM education to our local public schools in MA

Mike M
on August 8, 2012 11:03 PM

I think John Maeda is missing the point of STEM. It is not that Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math are more important that ART, it is that the US has a large shortage of people in these fields. If he is trying say the US has a shortage of ART students he is just wrong.